Why Reading is Dangerous - Part 2

You can read the first part of this article right here

WHY READING IS DANGEROUS contd.

There were a lot of exceptional books for me, but there was one in particular. I read it when I was 14. It was written by another young teen, a girl who died in a concentration camp in 1945, two months before the liberation of Holland. Her name was Anne Frank.


I see the eight of us here in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we’re standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter. We’re surrounded by darkness and danger, and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other.


That has everything to do with the power and magic of reading—the darkness, and the danger, and the little trembling packets of magic that are words. It may sound odd to say that The Diary of Anne Frank brought me pleasure, but it did—a pleasure in uncovering that magic that transforms your personal geography, cultivates your sense of empathy, and cracks your heart wide open. A magic that sooner or later turns you into a
confirmed addict.


We read because we love stories, because we crave new ideas, because of the chance that tomorrow we might choose a book from a shelf, open it, and feel a connection with another person’s heart. A connection that transcends the barriers of continents and oceans and generations and death, and lets us stare into the soul of someone we’ve never met, never could meet.


We read because we are curious about the world. And though it’s probably hard to remember sometimes, we read because of the mysterious—and dangerous—magic of language.

The above was written by Anthony Doerr, the author of the new memoir Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World (Scribner), for Spirit Magazine (the Southwest Airlines mag): http://www.spiritmag....